The Discovery Institute Quote Mines Stephen Jay Gould

asey Luskin of the Discovery Institute has posted three articles at
the Discovery Institute's blog, Evolution News & Views,
entitled "Peer-Review, Intelligent Design, and John Derbyshire's
New Bumper Sticker"
Part I,
Part II
and Part III.

[T]he danger of the TalkOrigins page runs much deeper. It
seeks to instill a mindset where concepts must enjoy high levels
of support in the scientific community, and the oft-criticized
peer-reviewed literature, before being trusted. This mindset
threatens to inhibit the progress of science.

In conclusion, this point was made emphatically by Stephen Jay
Gould and other scientists to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993,
pleaing (sic) that courts should not disbar scientific evidence
from the courtroom simply because it hasn't won a "popularity"
contest:

Judgments based on scientific evidence, whether made
in a laboratory or a courtroom, are undermined by a categorical
refusal even to consider research or views that contradict
someone's notion of the prevailing "consensus" of scientific
opinion. ... Automatically rejecting dissenting views that
challenge the conventional wisdom is a dangerous fallacy, for
almost every generally accepted view was once eccentric deemed or
heretical. Perpetuating the reign of a supposed scientific
orthodoxy in this way, whether in a research laboratory or in a
courtroom, is profoundly inimical to the search for truth. ...
The quality of a scientific approach or opinion depends on the
strength of its factual premises and on the depth and consistency
of its reasoning, not on its appearance in a particular journal
or on its popularity among other scientists. (Brief
Amici Curiae
of Stephen Jay Gould (and other scientists) in support of
petitioners, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 509 U.S. 579
(1993) (No. 92-102).)

Would Dr. Gould approve of the mindset promoted by the
TalkOrigins webpage
or would he rightly recognize it as dangerous
to science?

Would it surprise anyone that Gould may be somewhat
misrepresented here? You can see for yourself because the Supreme
Court's decision in
Daubert and
the brief that Luskin quotes from can both be found on the
web, though you would not know that from Luskin's article.

The ellipses in Luskin's version are interesting. The first
leaves out a single short sentence:

Science progresses as much or more by the replacement
of old views as by the gradual accumulation of incremental
knowledge.

It seems a strange omission until you remember just what it
was that Darwin's theory replaced. Perhaps the faithful were not
deemed ready to contemplate that Intelligent Design (ID), in its earlier and more
honest manifestation as Natural Theology, was the dominant view
that was displaced by evolutionary theory.

The text represented by the second ellipsis is much more
extensive, covering several paragraphs and moving into a
completely different section of the brief. Normal conventions for
quoting would have at least had the text following the second
ellipsis set off in its own paragraph. Among those issues omitted
along with the missing text is the fact that the brief is
complaining about the Circuit court relying solely on
whether or not a proposition has made it into the scientific
literature as a mechanistic test of its admissibility.
As the Brief put it:

The [Circuit] court thereby converted that editorial
tool into something no scientist or journal editor ever meant it
to be: a litmus test for scientific truth. This is not the way
scientists work in their laboratories and symposia, and it is not
the way that science should be used in the courtroom if the goal
is to ensure the most accurate and valid judgments
possible.

Specifically, the Brief complained that the:

. . . Court of Appeals did not even purport to
investigate the soundness or professionalism of the expert's
approach. Instead, it simply asserted, without reference to any
authority drawn from the scientific community, that [a procedure]
is "generally accepted by the scientific community" only when it
is subject to peer-review and published.

Of course, Judge Jones did nothing of the sort. The section
where he addressed the issue of peer review was only 3 pages out
of a 25 page discussion, most of which was devoted to three main
reasons why ID is not science. Those reasons were [p. 64]:

(2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID,
employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that
doomed creation science in the 1980's; and

(3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted
by the scientific community.

Only then does Judge Jones mention:

As we will discuss in more detail below, it is
additionally important to note that ID has failed to
gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated
peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of
testing and research. (Emphasis added)

Thus, Judge Jones clearly recognized that the lack of
peer-reviewed publications (or the pathetically few
peer-reviewed publications, even
allowing for the five whole articles, after almost
20 years, that Luskin cites) was not definitive but was just
one, and not the most important, of the diagnostic
criteria for a scientific theory. Luskin's failure to reveal the
actual argument that was made in the amicus brief Gould
signed is quote mining. His attempt to use it against Judge
Jones' thoughtful and nuanced decision is merely bad sleight of
hand.

I think is safe to say that, if the only reason
anyone gave for rejecting the claim that ID is science was
because it wasn't publishing peer-reviewed articles, Stephen Jay
Gould would have strongly objected. But his objection would have
been that such an argument only begins to scratch the
surface of why ID fails as science.